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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25562542">Return to Trap Street</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marathon_Zack_140_6/pseuds/Marathon_Zack_140_6'>Marathon_Zack_140_6</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Everyone keeps their memories, Everyone lives, F/M, Fluff, Fun, Happy Ending, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, paradoxes, to the whole Hell Bent drama and angst and sadness</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 12:28:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,488</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25562542</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marathon_Zack_140_6/pseuds/Marathon_Zack_140_6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>What really happened after the Diner. Light and fluffy and fun. Whouffaldi, but mostly background [i.e. the relationship isn’t the focus]. Post–Hell Bent.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Return to Trap Street</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Clara walked over to the TARDIS door, and opened it.</p>
<p>She sat down on the floor with her feet hanging out, staring into space, thinking. It hadn’t even been two hours since she lost the Doctor, and it already hurt more than she could bare. If this was what the Doctor felt every time he lost a companion, no wonder he never stopped running.</p>
<p>Oh why, oh why could she not have just accepted her lack of a heartbeat when they were still on Gallifrey, and ran away with the Doctor happily ever after? Why did she have to insist on having a heartbeat, and when it became apparent the Doctor couldn’t give that to her, insist on being returned to Gallifrey to die? If she’d just kept her mouth shut, accepted the fact she had no heartbeat but was still alive, she could be off having adventures with the Doctor right now, both of them with all their memories, instead of alone and on a path that would eventually end with her returning to her death on Trap Street. If only she could rewrite time like the Doctor, and go back and let him save her like he was trying to.</p>
<p>Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t been paying attention to the corner of space she was staring into. But now she noticed that all the stars and galaxies that she could see from her perch all seemed to be going blurry and merging together. As she blinked her eyes a few times, to try to clear them, everything merged together into one continuous whiteness; an unnatural whiteness, and strangely machine-like.</p>
<p>As her eyes cleared, she realized she was staring at the center console of her TARDIS.</p>
<p>
  <em>How did I get from the door to laying on the TARDIS floor staring at the console?</em>
</p>
<p>Then she noticed a bushy mane of grey hair, and the unmistakable face of the Doctor kneeling next to her.</p>
<p>“Doctor?” she asked groggily, the sleep in her voice surprising her; she’d been wide awake just a few seconds earlier sitting in the TARDIS door.</p>
<p>“Oh good, you’re finally awake. It was taking you a long time. I was worried it wasn’t going to work.”</p>
<p>“You remember me?”</p>
<p>“Of course. Did you seriously think I was going to let either of us lose our memories?”</p>
<p>Clara threw her arms around him, clinging to him for dear life, crying her eyes out. The Doctor hugged her back tightly, letting her pour it all out.</p>
<p>After all, he knew exactly what she’d just been through (even if it hadn’t actually been real for her), going through it every single time he lost a companion — and even more so when he’d thought he’d lost <em>her</em> forever. And he also knew what it felt like for her to get him back, as he’d experienced it both when she started traveling with him again after the dream crabs, and then far more so when he’d just got her back on Gallifrey.</p>
<p>Eventually she’d cried all her tears of joy out, and let go of him and stepped back slightly. Looking him up and down, seeing that he looked exactly the same as his pre-memory loss self, made her remember that he’d left her all afternoon thinking he had absolutely no memory of her, and had even talked with her in the diner pretending he didn't know who she was, and her mood took a one-eighty. </p>
<p>“<em>Why?!</em> Why would you let me go through all that, thinking I’d lost you forever, and caused you to lose all of your memories as well?” she cried, punching him in the shoulder repeatedly.</p>
<p>“Ow!” he exclaimed, jumping back from her, and trying to put the TARDIS console between him and his suddenly irate companion. "I needed you to want to live, to want to still travel with me. To realize what you were losing by insisting on a heartbeat. And before you beat me up again, nothing that you just went through actually happened!”</p>
<p>Clara was still stalking around the console making the Doctor stumble backwards to keep several feet between them, but she <em>had</em> noticeably calmed down at least a little at his explanation — not that the Doctor had actually noticed it in his intense focus not to get beaten up by his five foot one companion.</p>
<p>“So everything that happened after we used the neural blocker and you lost your memory…?”</p>
<p>“Was just a dream created by <em>this</em>” — here the Doctor held up the neural blocker — “to let you experience exactly what it would be like if you got what you wanted.”</p>
<p>“Like the dream patches.”</p>
<p>“Like the dream patches,” replied the Doctor. "The only way you would continue traveling with me is if you realized you wanted to travel with me more than anything else, regardless of the fact you have no heartbeat, and never will."</p>
<p>“Well, you certainly succeeded at that,” said Clara sadly as she came to a stop, resting her hand lightly on the console. “And all I’ve managed to do is betray you and your trust all over again. How do you keep putting up with me?”</p>
<p>“Four and half billion years. Duty of care. Remember?” answered the Doctor softly, slowly edging his way towards her, lest it all be a trap and she start hitting him again.</p>
<p>But she didn’t, and he made it safely to her, and hesitantly wrapped his arms around her.</p>
<p>“Thank you, Doctor. And I love you, too,” she whispered as she buried her head into his chest.</p>
<p>After several minutes she noticed the Doctor was discreetly messing with the buttons and levers and whatchamacallits and doohickies on the TARDIS console, and so let him go.</p>
<p>“So where are we going?”</p>
<p>“Trap Street. I need to get <em>my</em> TARDIS back, and we need to bury your body.”</p>
<p>Clara wanted to ask how her body could be on Trap Street when the Doctor had just pulled her out of Trap Street back on Gallifrey, but she was too thankful just to be back with the Doctor to question anything at the moment. There would be time for questions she probably wouldn’t understand the answers to later. But there was one question she did have to ask.</p>
<p>“Where’s Ashildr? She was here before the whole neural block thing.”</p>
<p>“I threw her back out into the time bubble we found her in while you were asleep,” replied the Doctor indifferently, continuing to flip levers on the console.</p>
<p>“Oh. Won’t she eventually die when the bubble runs out, though?” asked Clara.</p>
<p>She watched him flip things randomly, wondering if this TARDIS was similar to his own, in that you did very little actual steering of the time traveling sentient machine, as she just took the Doctor to that still point between where he wanted to go and where he needed to be. Then she remembered that TARDIS/pilot pairs were supposed to be rotated every once in a while so a relationship like the Doctor and his TARDIS’s wasn’t formed, and reasoned that this one probably could actually be steered.</p>
<p>“Everyone does, eventually. And she’s lived far longer than most, even for an immortal,” replied the Doctor, walking around to the other side of console, still messing with the console.</p>
<p>“Everyone except you,” mumbled Clara to herself as she followed the Doctor.</p>
<p>“And now you,” replied the Doctor. “Can’t kill what’s frozen between one heartbeat and the next.”</p>
<p>Clara stopped short and stared at him. It had never entered her mind that she was immortal now. Sure, in her dream she’d told Ashildr that she was taking the long way around to Gallifrey, but she was a healthy, late-twenties/early thirties year old (time travel made a bit complicated to keep proper track of one’s age) — she had just assumed she had a full life left to travel. Not eternity.</p>
<p>“I’m like you now?” she breathed out.</p>
<p>But the Doctor just threw the final lever, sending the stolen TARDIS into the Vortex.</p>
<p>~DW~</p>
<p>Landing back in London a few minutes later, the Doctor opened the door to show them facing the familiar blue Police Box that was the TARDIS they both knew and loved, and loved them back.</p>
<p>Well, loved the Doctor back anyway — Clara still felt like the TARDIS still felt threatened by her.</p>
<p>The Doctor set the stolen TARDIS to fly back to Gallifrey of the future, before he and Clara walked out. As soon as the Doctor closed the door behind him, the ship whirred into nothingness.</p>
<p>The two of them walked into the Doctor’s TARDIS, which chirped cheerfully as the Doctor walked in, before giving a few angry-sounding beeps as she realized Clara had walked in as well.</p>
<p>“You two are really going to have to settle this catfight you have going on,” mumbled the Doctor as he sent his girl into flight.</p>
<p>Landing a few seconds later, Clara opened the door to find them in an alley on Trap Street. Knowing they didn’t have much time to spare, they quickly headed down the street towards where they knew Clara was about to die.</p>
<p>They found a spot behind a wall to hide, and after a few minutes watched Clara walk out of the house and stand before the raven, crumpling to the ground lifeless. Continuing to watch, they saw the Doctor walk out from the doorway where he’d been watching, and pick up her body. He then carried it back into the building, so it wouldn’t be lying on the ground when he was gone.</p>
<p>After giving past-Doctor enough time to enter the machine and be transported to his confession dial, the Doctor and Clara left their hiding spot and walked out into the street. Coming up to the door of the house their past selves had just been in, and Ashildr was presumably still in, they opened the door and walked in.</p>
<p>As Ashildr turned and saw them, her jaw dropped.</p>
<p>"Sorry, but we're going to need my body," said Clara as she walked past a frozen in shock Ashildr, through the door into the bedroom where the Doctor had carried her body and laid it on the bed.</p>
<p>As she looked down at her very dead body, out in the main room she could hear the Doctor telling Ashildr that it was still a very small universe, and he was still very angry with her. A few seconds later the Doctor walked into the bedroom behind her, and walked over and picked up her body.</p>
<p>Clara had a brief flashback to Eleven having done the same thing carrying her out of his time-stream on Trenzalore, but the memory flashed in and out before she could really see it.</p>
<p>"Ready?" he asked her.</p>
<p>Clara nodded, and the Doctor carried her body back through the main room and out of the house, with Clara following close behind him. Neither of them said a word to Ashildr as they passed, before walking through the streets of Trap Street, ignoring all the strange looks they were getting, back to the TARDIS.</p>
<p>As they walked into the TARDIS, Clara asked the question that had been on the top of her mind ever since the Doctor had said they were returning to Trap Street to retrieve her body.</p>
<p>"How could my body still be there? I thought you pulled me out of here. Does this mean I still eventually have return to Gallifrey to die so my body will be there?"</p>
<p>"No! Absolutely not! But the universe doesn’t know that,” exclaimed the Doctor. "Changing a fixed point in time creates a lot of paradoxes, which is why I'm not supposed to do it. You really died on Trap Street, and I watched it happen. Then I went to Gallifrey the long way round to save you from dying in the first place, which would <em>theoretically</em> create the same paradox as me going back in time to stop your death, but in your case actually won't.</p>
<p>“So I pulled you out of your time-stream, but as you’ve discovered, that doesn't actually restart your heartbeat and your time-stream, because history hasn’t actually been changed yet. Because the only way to <em>actually</em> change history is if you <em>never</em> returned to your death on Trap Street. Now in a normal instance of changing a fixed death, the most common way for that to be achieved would be for you to die somewhere other than Trap Street, in such a manner that is distinctly different from your Trap Street death, so that it isn’t just a slight bend in a still-fixed death.</p>
<p>"But since you have no heartbeat now, and therefore cannot actually die, that clearly can't happen. So as a time-traveler, which you are, there is nowhere for you to go in the end but back to Trap Street. You can travel through time forever, but at the end of it you'll still be alive, and you'll still be able to go back to Trap Street, and your death can still occur — which is exactly what the universe assumes will occur.</p>
<p>“Therefore, to the universe, your death still occurs, like we saw, and we can go pick up your dead body off the slab. Because the only alternatives to you eventually returning to Trap Street are that you die with the universe, or you survive past the death of the universe. But the universe can't assume that either of those impossibilities will actually occur until one of them does.</p>
<p>"But the moment a timeline exists where you don't die on Trap Street is the moment the universe no longer does, and therefore it no longer matters. So as long as the universe still exists, you will eventually die on Trap Street fulfilling your death, so we could go get your body, even though it won't actually occur. Understand?"</p>
<p>“No," replied Clara, completely lost for most of his explanation.</p>
<p>"I pulled you out, but since your death is a fixed point in time, as far as the universe is concerned, your death still occurs. To the universe, it <em>must</em> occur until it actually doesn’t. But the only way it can <em>not</em> occur is if the universe ends without you having ever gone back, at which point the universe will be over anyway, so it doesn’t matter. The ability for you to still go back and fulfill the universe's destiny for you keeps the universe humming along nice and quietly, while we blatantly break all the rules of time, space, and death without cracking all of time and space like normal — all because you have no heartbeat and therefore can’t die outside of Trap Street. Better?”</p>
<p>“A little, but not really,” replied Clara, feeling a little depressed and sad that she had traveled with the Doctor for two and half years and still couldn’t understand what he was saying.</p>
<p>"Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Paradox Stuff."</p>
<p>"Okay. That I understand."</p>
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